Capital Gains: Uber's China competition approaches a $2B round, Ford and Microsoft buy into Pivotal

Uber's chief international rival, Didi Kuaidi, is on the verge of swallowing another $2 billion in funding. Kleiner Perkins and Sherpa Capital put money into a sock maker, and both Android-creator Andy Rubin and singer/songwriter Timbaland invested in a startup. Here are the headlines in startup funding from this past week:

• Didi Kuaidi, the Chinese Tencent- and Alibaba-backed Uber competitor, is closing in on a $2 billion funding round that would set the company's value at around $25 billion. Initial reports from February said that the company was only looking to raise $1 billion (Bloomberg).
• Ford and Microsoft co-lead a $253 million investment in Pivotal, the software development company that is controlled by EMC. The round sets Pivotal's value at roughly $2.8 billion.
• Stance, an Orange County-based sock and underwear retailer, raised $30 million in Series D funding from August Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Menlo Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and Sherpa Capital. The round was led by Mercato Partners (Orange County Business Journal).
• ROLI, a London company that makes high-end digital piano keyboards, landed a $27 million investment led by Foundry Group, with additional cash from Founders Fund, Index Ventures, Universal Music and others (Business Insider).
• Adtech startup Drawbridge, which helps customers track user data across multiple devices and sites, raised $25 million in a new Series C round led by Sequoia, with participation from Kleiner Perkins and Northgate Capital (Silicon Valley Business Journal).
• Israeli payments technology startup Zooz raised $24 million in new funding from Target Global Ventures (Germany), Fang Fund Partners (China) and a group of other international investors (Reuters).
• Ex-Apple and Yahoo data center guy Scott Noteboom's startup LitBit, which makes software to connect "dumb" home devices (like air conditioners) to the Internet, got $7 million in a new round. The investment was led by Storm Ventures, with participation from Jerry Yang's AME Cloud Ventures, Illuminate Ventures and Correlation Ventures (Business Insider).
• Los Angeles startup SubPac, which makes "immersive physical-sound technology" that users can wear (there's a video here), raised $6 million from a group of investors that includes Android creator Andy Rubin and Timbaland (VentureBeat).
• Peter Thiel and Montage Ventures kicked in cash for a seed investment in the medical care consumer lending startup Parasail Health. The amount invested was not disclosed (PRweb).

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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